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Urban Wallpaper

Citation for published version:Hoek, L 2016, 'Urban Wallpaper: Film Posters, City Walls and the Cinematic Public in South Asia' SouthAsia, vol 39, no. 1, pp. 73-92. DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1139029

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):10.1080/00856401.2016.1139029

Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer

Document Version:Peer reviewed version

Published In:South Asia

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Download date: 14. Jun. 2018

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1139029

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/urban-wallpaper(3430a8e5-23ca-4551-955c-9e33089946af).html

Film Posters on City Walls: the Cinematic Public in Urban

South Asia

LOTTE HOEK

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

What do film posters on city walls tells us about the relationship between the cinema

and the city? In this paper I rely on the practice and perspective of young men who

put up film posters onto Dhaka’s city walls to explore this question. I argue that the

wall is a key site for the production of a cinematic public that does not map onto film

audiences; for the experience of newness in the city and of the cinema as analogous

experiences; and for an encounter with imagery that is considered luminous and

intense, afflicting the crowds that pass them by in the congested city.

Keywords: cinema, film posters, circulation, walls, cinematic public, crowd, newness,

city, film audiences, Bangladesh.

Posters and Publics

The surfaces of Dhaka’s streets are replete with film posters. They are so ubiquitous

that you could easily miss the rapid turnover of these brightly coloured

announcements. In fact, it wasn’t until I started to work with the young men who

cycle through the megacity at night affixing posters to its walls, that I realised exactly

how quickly and constantly the Dhaka walls change. Posters that the afficheurs or

posterwallahs put up one evening could have disappeared the next, encouraging

“Urban Wallpaper” – Hoek Published in South Asia 39(1): 73-92, 2016

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further rounds of poster work. Their labour continually remakes the city’s surfaces as

they cover urban thoroughfares with vibrant announcements of the ‘next big thing’.

The work of the posterwallah is based on a straightforward premise with

significant consequences: that the city wall is a medium for making the cinema public

by means of film posters. From this premise, and the labour it incites, a relationship

between the cinema and the city can be proposed that takes the city wall as its starting

point. In this paper I reiterate the exchange between the cinematic and the urban noted

by many scholars1 from the vantage point of the intersection between film posters and

Dhaka’s walls, those concrete structures that shape the very textures and movements

around urban spaces. I will argue that the city wall in Dhaka is a medium for the

presence of the cinema per se, instead of the announcement of particular film texts.

That is, the wall provides the medium through which the city comes to be inhabited

by and infused with the cinema in general, rather than merely being the site of

publicity for a film in particular. Let me take the wall and the poster up in turn to

frame the journey that will follow.

An omnipresent part of urban infrastructures, the wall has appeared in

scholarship as a clear site of contemporary modes of segregation and the historical

means to instituting colonial hierarchies of race, community and gender, even if

walls’ apparent solidity has also been found to be chimerical.2 The latter opens up the

1 Such as in Nezar Al Sayyad, Cinematic Urbanism : A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (London: Routledge , 2006); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans), (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002); Gyan Prakash (ed.), Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 2 For example, see Teresa P. R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); William J. Glover, 2008, Making Lahore Modern: constructing and imagining a colonial city (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘From Culture to Barbed Wire: On Houses and Walls in South Africa’ in The Texas International Law Journal, Vol. 46, No. 345 (2011), pp. 297-315; Stephen Legg, Spaces of colonialism:


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possibility of the wall as a contested semiotic and material site. In the practice of

Dhaka’s poster-pasters, the wall is continually renewed, papered over and revisioned,

as their work stirs its surface.3 The concrete solidity of the wall is animated by

posterwallahs to become a “thirdspace, ”4 a hard structure of the “soft city.”5 It is in

this city, come alive in the everyday practice of the afficheur, that the wall appears as

a space for projection and a means of communication. Here the wall is a medium.

But the wall is not a ‘clean’ medium that disappears in favour of the colourful

messages borne on its surface. Rather, it interferes with the poster in ways that I will

suggest are central to how the wall functions as a medium for the cinema and

produces a cinematic public. Following theorists of infrastructure and media,6 I will

show that the wall is not an inert, passive or transparent medium. This is important

because it is at this point that the wall shapes the messages from the film industry

away from particularity (this film, on that date, in this theatre) to a greater generality

(cinema, now, here).

The plentiful film posters on Dhaka’s walls underscore the need to consider a

cinematic public that does not map onto film audiences. Especially in Bangladesh, but

across South Asia, there is a disjunction between the presence of the cinema in the

public sphere and the particularities of empirical audiences and specific films. Given

the flourishing literature on the world- and self-making powers of the cinema in South

Delhi’s urban governmentalities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); Setha Lowe, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000). 4 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996). 5 Jonathan Raban, Soft City (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974). 6 Nikhil Anand, ‘Pressure: The Polytechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai’, in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2011), pp. 542-563; Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2010).


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Asia,7 we need a means to account for a cinematic public that does not watch (many)

films, especially as cinema is scattered far and wide into what Preminda Jacob,

describing film banners and cut-outs in South India, calls “extra-cinematic space.”8

The film poster on the city wall speaks to the omnipresence of the film image in South

Asia far beyond the discrete audience and particular viewers of a film. It points to the

participation of the cinema in the domain of “mass publicity – the broader space in

which the cinema breathes,”9 to its life beyond the film viewed on screen.

To understand the pull of the cinema, to the extent that it can create a public

without a commitment to read its texts,10 the work of posterwallahs highlights the

intersection of dense paths of urban circulation with the visual intensity and

luminosity in cinematic imagery. Combined these produce a mode of urban viewing

that allows even the reluctant or disinterested to be addressed by the cinema and

constituted as its public. This is important, because it gives us a clue how in those

parts of South Asia where films are considered by many to be ‘bad’, or ‘dirty’,

unsophisticated, not aimed at them, not made properly, not watchable in suitable

places or any of the other persuasive reasons why people turn away from films, how

even in those places, cinema has the political, economic, cultural and emotional

7 This takes many forms, too abundant to all be cited. For example: Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Zakir Hossain Raju, Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity: In Search of the Modern, (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha (eds.), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 118-140; Rachel Dwyer, Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India (London: Reaktion Books, 2014). 8 Preminda Jacob, Celluloid Deities: the Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009), p. 3. 9 William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 2. 10 Cf. Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, in Public Culture Vol. 14, No. 1 (2002), pp. 49-90.


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resonance and importance that we have come to accord it based on the studies

demonstrating the significance of cinema in South Asia.11

To pursue these points, I will take you along a night-time ride through Dhaka

city. This article is deliberately structured as a single night’s encounter. I aim to

illustrate the impermanence of the city’s surfaces, the façades that move in rhythm

with the city’s continually changing form. I want to emphasise the ‘superficial’ and

the temporary nature of the city’s sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch. Based on

this single night, I present two storylines in this paper. In the first, I recount one night

of poster-pasting with a crew in Dhaka on 8 April 2010. This story is marked by a

symbol of a bicycle (!). This storyline has its own velocity. I recount our movements

around the city by bicycle, presenting a form of mapping that Valentine shows can

bring together different sites, people and practices, travelling at different speeds, that

may not be united by other means of writing.12 This storyline about transport shows

ethnographically how images are ‘set before’ people. I, as ethnographer, move with

the posterwallahs, at their pace, encountering the nighttime city and its inhabitants, as

the afficheurs materialise the images from the film industry within the medium of the

wall, waiting for the daytime crowds to move along them. It is an ethnographic

account of circulation.

The second storyline, inspired by this single night, combines two sets of

reflections. The first are of observations by Mohammad Rokon, posterwallah and tea-

stall owner in Dhaka. “I know all of Dhaka,” Rokon told me. He had been putting up

11 Amongst which, recently, Ali Nobil Ahmed, ‘Film and Cinephilia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death’ in Bioscope Vol. 5, No. 1 (2014): pp. 81-89; William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); M. Madhava Prasad, Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014); S.V. Srinivas, Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2013). 12 David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 7.


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posters onto the walls of Dhaka city since he was thirteen years old. Now twenty-nine,

the business held no secrets for him and I relied on his reflections to get a better grasp

of the posterwallah’s business. The second set of reflections is my own, combining

theoretical concerns with my ongoing research into the film industry. Together these

narratives make up three pairs of ethnographic-conceptual sections that map onto

three points. The first point relates to the disjunction between the audience and the

public of the cinema. The second describes how newness marks both the experience

of the cinema and of the city. The third sets out a theory of urban viewing that

combines visual intensity with circulatory density to account for the way in which the

imagery of the cinema reaches out from its walls. Each of these sections indicates the

entwining of the city and the cinematic in different ways, as walls fuse with posters,

are continuously renewed, and produce dense sites for viewing the radiant imagery of

the cinema.

Before we set off on our journey, a final word of caution: while the production

and forms of the film posters are worth an extended discussion, in this article I am not

primarily concerned with these aspects.13

Kakrail to Bangla Motor !

The narrow street leading from Kakrail into Segunbagicha was crammed even at

10pm. Cars, rickshaws, and other vehicles were jammed between the Rajmoni cinema

hall on one side of the street, and two tall office towers housing the production

companies of the Bangladesh film industry on the other side. The financial heart of 13 The early history of the film poster in colonial India, as well as work on Tamil, Hindi and Pakistani cinema posters, can be read to think analogously about Bangladeshi film posters, much of whose story is similar. See Ali Khan, ‘Pakistani Film Poster Art’, in BioScope Vol. 5, No. 2 (2014): 183-190; Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Preminda Jacob, Celluloid Deities; Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘The Bombay film poster’, in Seminar No. 525 (2003) [http://www.india-seminar.com, accessed 1 Dec. 2015].


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the industry, this narrow street was visited by production boys carrying stacks of film

tins, cameramen trailed by director’s assistants, junior artists in their finery, and even

the chauffeur driven stars of the Bangladeshi screen. Unlike many other roads in the

city, this street always smelled vaguely sweet. The smells of the stuffed puris sold by

street vendors outside the cinema hall blended with the fragrance of nighttime flowers

drifting in from the gardens of government offices deeper inside Segunbagicha.

One of the office towers looked increasingly dilapidated. Tussles with the City

Cooperation had left the building suspended between imminent demolition and

forthcoming permissions to add further levels onto the building. Construction had

started, as had demolition, leaving the film production building looking distinctly

ragged. Like the national film industry itself, the building struggled between decay

and potential. On the pavement beneath this conflicted tower, a fleet of transport

tricycles had floated in. Young men sat smoking on the wooden platforms on the back

wheels of these ‘van-garis’. Their cyclists hung over the steering, waiting.

The heavy thump of large bundles of film posters slapped onto the vans

animated the group. These were five different designs of poster for the film Khoj-The

Search (2010, Iftekhar Chowdhury dir.).14 Buckets were passed around and filled with

water, while the men split up into groups, three per cycle. A short man in shirt-pant

had come from the producer’s offices and oversaw the distribution of the posters and

14 The film Khoj-The Search flopped when it was released in April 2010 after a massive investment by the hero-producer of the film M.A. Jalil Ananta. An outsider to the film industry, Ananta made his fortune through garments factories. His first film did become a cult hit among young middle class Bangladeshis, who enthusiastically quoted Ananta’s heavily accented English, repeating ‘I am saarsing phor ma lubh!’ or renaming a fictional sequel ‘Paisi – The Found’. Subsequent films by Jalil have seen him become a phenomenon, combining an extraordinary star persona with unique films that appeal to both working class audiences in single screen halls and English medium educated multiplex viewers and have left critics dumbstruck. See Samia R. Karim, ‘The Bangu Also Rises,’ Bdnews24. (26 Sept. 2013), [http://opinion.bdnews24.com, accessed 26 Sept. 2013].


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the small strips of printed text that would go over them announcing: “16 April,

Auspicious Release - Across the whole country” [Subhomukti – Saradesh Baypi].

Names of city parks, markets, and roundabouts were called out as each van

was assigned a different trajectory through the city. “We’ll take them,” signalled one

of the young men pointing at us, “which way are you going?” “Monipuripara,

Farmgate” replied Paul, my partner and photographer. The nighttime streets of Dhaka

were considered even more unsafe for women than the daylight roads often proved to

be, and thus I was accompanied. “They’ll go with me,” interrupted the short man who

introduced himself as Ahsan, “I’m going through Farmgate.”

“Sit,” smiled Mithu, the young van-wallah resting on the handle bars of his

cargo cycle. He had a long night of heavy cycling ahead of him. His burden had just

increased with an anthropologist and a photographer. “This side,” he said to me,

motioning me to sit at the front left of the van, keeping me furthest away from the

traffic we were about to plunge into. I leaned back against the pile of posters stacked

onto the van, my legs dangling beside Mithu’s paddles. Ahsan sat down on the other

side of Mithu, having given up the best seat on the platform to me. As the producer’s

assistant, he would lead the expedition. “Cholo, cholo, cholo,” he called to Liton, our

posterwallah who came over carrying a container of glue.

At 10:30pm the five of us set off from Kakrail. Mithu put his full weight onto

the pedals as we pushed off into the heavy traffic. Our route ran through the main

roads of central Dhaka, which would be busy until at least midnight. Skilfully Mithu

manoeuvred us out of the path of the long-distance buses raging past and the furiously

honking private cars, into the swell of cycle rickshaws that blurred the edges of the

main roads after their 10pm curfew had been lifted.


9

Picking up speed, Mithu cycled us past the central church, home to the Bishop

of Dhaka, and the Kakrail Mosque, where all year long Tablighi’s from all over the

world could be seen hopping across the traffic islands in front of their mosque.

Curving along Dhaka’s main park we turned right under the Sakura bar, its dark tinted

windows concealing the whisky drinkers inside its smoky rooms. We were now on

track towards the Bangla-Motor intersection, where our poster-pasting route began.

“Stop, near that tin,” pointed Liton. The ‘tin’ in question was a wall of

corrugated iron put up by the Dhaka City Corporation beside the main road. A blue

sign announced the City Corporation was working on a new pavement. Stretching a

good twenty metres across, the ‘tin’ had been used abundantly by teams just like

Liton’s. Remnants of posters advertising soft drinks, action movies, IELTS courses,

National Children’s Day and the Bangladesh Revolutionary Worker’s Party decorated

most of the tin. All were ripped and torn, parts dissolving into streaks of white paper

still stuck to the tin, their coloured surfaces ripped off. The many layers had blended

together, constituting a new set of collaged images. The raised fist of a revolutionary

worker vanished into the cleavage of a beheaded film actress (figure 1).

HERE FIGURE 1

Liton ran his brush through the pot with glue and held a single sheet poster up

against the ribbed surface of the wall. As he smeared the watery glue into it, the paper

melted into the curves of the corrugated iron sheets. Mithu handed him a smaller strip

of paper announcing the film’s release. “More, put more,” said Ahsan from his

position on the van. Together, Mithu and Liton put up the different designs all along

the tin wall, while a crowd gathered along the roadside to watch them. Satisfied with

the range of posters, Ahsan motioned Mithu back to the van-gari, and we set off

again.


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Walls between Audiences and Publics

The textures of the walls of Dhaka city change in the moist air and fertile greenery

that work upon the concrete surfaces of the city, eating away at it and covering it in

shades of green and brown as bits of flora and fauna emerge on its planes and

interstices. Over this are papered posters of all sorts. On Dhaka’s walls, posters shared

their space with weeds, newspapers, drains, nails holding bunches of banana’s, dan

boxes to donate bits of money to worthy causes, painted advertisements and many

other more or less transient objects.

HERE FIGURE 2

The complex surfaces of densely populated walls have for long been a means

to address the many who pass them by every day and night, with notices,

advertisements, political slogans, and much else. On many Dhaka streets, newspapers

are put up in their entirety. In figure 2, men read the widely circulated and mainstream

daily newspaper Yugantor that has been put up in a frame on the wall of the

Farhatunissa Waqf Estate, which runs a public mosque, madrassa, library and

educational centre at this place in Monipuripara, Dhaka. In this neighbourhood

associated with its many Christian households, the wall is a boundary into a mix of

sacred and secular domains, as well as opening out into the world of media and news

through the newspaper and its readers. The figure illustrates how people are

accustomed to turn their eyes to the wall and be transported.

Onto such walls posterwallah Rokon would paste his posters. “I also do ‘party

posters’ [for political parties],” said Rokon, “but it pays less. Cinema money is good.”

The pay was good, because the work was of consequence: “It is important, without

publicity, films don’t run.” Using the English word ‘publicity’, Rokon highlighted the


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clear function of the film posters. As a piece of advertisement the film poster aimed to

persuade potential viewers of a film’s worth or interest. This persuasion took the form

of visual ingredients associated with the film’s genre. In the action films that

dominated the Bangladesh film industry, these were guns and machetes, bloodied

faces of prominent film heroes, skimpily dressed actresses or villains laughing

insanely (see figure 3). The title of the film (some of its letters substituted by guns or

swords), the names of the director, main actors and the production house would

feature prominently. As for Bombay films, these “[g]eneric elements are

compositionally arranged to reflect the multi-genre look of popular Bombay

cinema”15 and focus on the star.16 “They can’t read or write, but they recognise a

face,” said Rokon. In his account, the posters were designed effectively to visually

address and persuade passersby of the nature and worth of the films advertised. They

enacted the processes that Preminda Jacob describes as “image transference, from

screen-to-street,”17 and in this way participated in the production of the public

culture18 of the cinema. In Dhaka, the image of the film was projected into the street

to draw an audience back into the theatres.

HERE FIGURE 3

But many of those passing by the posters put up by Rokon and his colleagues

would not be persuaded by the film posters to enter a theatre. Since the 1980s turn

towards fantasy and action cinema, the popular Bangladeshi cinema has lost

significant sections of its audience, including many women and middle class

15 Mazumdar, ‘Bombay Film Poster’, p. 3 16 Ibid. 17 Jacob, Celluloid Deities, p. 118. 18 Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai, ‘Why Public Culture’ in Public Culture Vol. 1, No. 1 (1999), pp. 5-9.


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patrons.19 Instead, the films have been largely patronised by semi-urban and rural

viewers as well as migrant workers in the cities, mostly male, nearly all young and

often poor. An important implication of this has been the dwindling of film

advertising in newspapers, magazines and on television, in favour of poster

advertising. Powerfully announcing the presence of spectators and producers of

popular films in the public space of the city, the posters would also encounter a large

swathe of reluctant viewers who might refuse, resist or disregard the existence of the

films, actors and narratives that the posters tried to make visually present. Films, their

stars and aesthetics, could anticipate many a cold shoulder in the streets of Dhaka.

Considering the ubiquity of urban media such as the film poster, however, a

purposively elsewhere-directed glance could only be achieved with the most

strenuous concentration, as from everywhere posters beckon. Given the very slow

circulation of any traveller around this city so terminally grid-locked with traffic jams,

posters beckon through the windows of cars or to rickshaws stalled or creeping

through Dhaka’s avenues and alleys. But even at higher speeds, the city has a means

to make visible the poster on its walls. As Roxanne Varsi’s account of the surfaces of

Teheran suggests, “The place of the city is like the flicker of a movie-projector where

in the moment of viewing, the image has disappeared.”20 However, she adds that “at

the same time, once something is seen, even if only for a second, it has the power to

inhabit the mind.”21 The wild titles, gory and sexy images, and abundant colours of

popular film posters could lodge themselves into the minds even of reluctant city

dwellers. This is evident from the voluble rejection, the prolific name-calling, the

19 Raju, Bangladesh Cinema; Gitiara Nasreen and Fahmidul Haq, Bangladesher Chalochchitra Shilpo: Sangkote Janosangskriti (Dhaka: Shrabon Prokashoni, 2008). 20 Roxanne Varsi, Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolutionary Teheran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 65. 21 Ibid.


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outrageous joking, as well as camp and commercial reclamations, and much

unfeigned apathy, for the popular cinema, by exactly those who disdainfully proclaim

not to be its audience, as I have described elsewhere.22 Such vociferous rejection of

the popular cinema by its detractors, including art filmmakers, middle class audiences,

government officers and many others, illustrates that they are subject to the imagery

of the cinema and have a relationship to it. As passers-by and onlookers, the urban

citizenry is everywhere addressed by the imagery of the film industry. Warner

suggests attention is required for the constitution of a public, but it may be “mere

attention”23: a bored wandering eye, a disavowed interest or desire, or the inevitability

of the endless repetition of the generic aesthetic qualities of the poster all suggest a

certain measure of “uptake.”24 Large parts of the urban populace are in this way

constituted as the film industry’s public, even in the mere brushing of a distracted

gaze of an unwilling commuter stuck in a jam for hours beside the walls of Airport

Road. Walking, sitting on a bus, on a bike, or being driven in a car, commuters will

see the film posters put up at night by the posterwallahs. Even if popular cinema is

often used to underscore the differences between the uncivil mass that watches

popular cinema (“rickshaw-wallah cinema”) and the sophisticated public that does

not,25 the dense, ever-present cinematic imagery on postered walls reach a vast

number of people, inviting all to be an “imaginary component of [its] fictional

field.”26 It is at this very point that the bright imagery of the cinema (see below)

22 Lotte Hoek, Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 23 Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, p. 60. 24 Ibid., p 61. 25 See also S.V. Srinivas, ‘Is There a Public in the Cinema Hall?’ Framework Vol. 42 (2000, summer) [www.framework-online.com/Issue42/42svs.html, accessed 14 Dec. 2010]. 26 Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema, (Delhi: Pelgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 135.


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interpellates the urban commuters not as citizenry but as a crowd.27 The very disdain

for cinema’s affective pull and the continuous reiteration that this is someone else’s

aesthetic form and pleasure, highlights the extent to which the poster effectively

reaches and engages the bodies and minds of those that pass before it. Here what

Mazzarella terms the “open edge of mass publicity”28 does not threaten to include

unsuitable others into the public called into being, but rather to unwillingly make me a

subject of its address alongside those others.

The presence of the cinema on the walls and within the field of vision of the

most reluctant passers-by suggests the contours of a large cinematic public that much

exceeds the boundaries of the audience for films. The way in which the cinema shapes

the experience of the city in South Asia and becomes embedded within our sensorium

can therefore be less reliant on the narrative text, or even the event and experience of

its screening in cinema halls or TV screens, and more embedded within film’s

ephemera such as posters, snippets of songs, vague gossip, all glimpsed and distantly

heard rather than dedicatedly viewed and listened to. Such a view massively expands

the way in which we can understand the public of the popular cinema (in Dhaka and

elsewhere in South Asia). It is cinema’s ephemeral forms that allow for its persistence

in shaping experience in South Asia.

Of course it isn’t only swords and cleavages that adorn Dhaka’s walls.

Dhaka’s commuters are mobilized by myriad images, colours and slogans speaking

from its walls. On walls antithetical groups, concepts and products come to occupy

the same site, opening out rival or antithetical worlds in adjacent spaces and within

27 Nusrat Chowdhury, ‘“Picture-Thinking”: Sovereigty and Citizenship in Bangladesh’ Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 87, No. 4 (2014), pp. 1257-1278; William Mazzarella, ‘The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?’ Critical Enquiry Vol. 36, No. 4 (2010), pp. 697-727. 28 Mazzarella, Censorium, p. 37 (my emphasis).


15

the frame of the wall. They display the conviviality of Awami League and Bangladesh

National Party posters, put up for different purposes by the same posterwallahs. They

mobilize the wall as a screen, a space of projection and communication for advertisers

and activists.

Walls are not, however, transparent screens, allowing projection and

communication without interference or static. The mass of rock, paper, and organic

matter that constitutes the posterwallah’s wall is not inert. As the plants and fungi

grow and dissipate along the walls, so do the posters. Put up, torn down, washed off,

covered over or peeled, the wallpaper of the city is alive. The city’s walls are a

continually changing set of backdrops, its colours transformed, a moving design,

changing like the fields and forests that frame the villages of Bangladesh. The rapid

disintegration of posters and other objects and messages on city walls produces a

palimpsest out of the quotidian “ruination” of wall surfaces.29

The wall’s ruination underscores how the material specificity of the wall

delimits how imagery and ideas appearing within it move.30 The wall creates

significant interference in the “screen-to-street” image transference process Jacob

describes.31 In ruined posters the narrative framing of the poster’s imagery loosened

or undone. As posters rip and dissolve, its imagery disperses along the wall, becomes

collaged in a mural montage. Now gently loosened from the tight narrative framing of

the individual poster, the film imagery blended into the wall produces an aesthetic

atmosphere of the cinema in the city. With the resurgence of the medium, the sign

itself becomes secondary to it, liable to be joined to other projects beyond the control

29 Yael Navaro-Yashin, ‘Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge’ in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 15, No. 1 (2009), pp. 1-18; Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, in Cultural Anthropology Vol. 23, No. 2 (2008), pp. 191-219. 30 See Larkin, Signal and Noise. 31 Jacob, Celluloid Deities.


16

of film producers or advertisers. In their continual transformations, the walls are

productive of entirely unpredictable and unstable articulations. Here “forests of

gestures are manifest in the streets, their movement cannot be captured in a picture,

nor can the meaning of their movement be circumscribed in a text. … it constitutes a

‘wandering of the semantic’.”32 In such wandering the poster’s imagery is loosened

from the particularities of the film that the poster advertises, to indicate more broadly

‘cinema.’ Within the dense visual layers of the wall, cinema is positioned alongside,

and mingled with, other generalities like politics, commerce, education or travel. It is

this ‘cinema in general’ (rather than a film in particular) that the poster on the wall

makes present to a cinematic public that is not the film’s audience.

Sonargoan Roundabout to Farmgate !

I gripped the wooden platform as Mithu cycled straight across a massive roundabout.

It was now 11pm and the volume of traffic had eased enough for the still abundant

vehicles to pick up speed on the wide avenues intersecting outside the Pan Pacific

hotel. Mithu pulled us resolutely through the intersection, stopping in front of a short

piece of wall bordering the Bank Asia offices. The bank stood opposite the

headquarters of the much-maligned WASA, mismanaging the city’s water supplies

with great regularity. Further along newspaper journalists smoked and chatted in the

tea stalls adjoining their office buildings.

The Bank Asia wall was covered in poster debris. Here and there the title and

images of ripped Khoj – the Search posters were visible. “You already did this route?”

I asked. “Last week,” said Liton. “What happened?” I asked, looking at the defaced

posters. “You can’t do it just once,” explained Liton, “you have to come back three,

32 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988), p. 102.


17

four times.” He explained that the posters get ripped off or other posters get pasted on

top. “Most posters only last one day,” he laughed at my disbelief, “you’ll only be able

to see these ones tomorrow morning!” I made a mental note to check the next days

whether this could really be true. With a quick stroke Liton pasted a new poster over

the wreckage of the old. “Do you also put your posters on those of others?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Liton, “but the posters of films that are still running we leave alone.” He

pointed to a poster along the little wall. “Ma Amar Jaan,” he read the title, “That’s

still running.” Mithu put a Khoj-the Search poster neatly next to it.

“Is it a good film?” asked someone in the group of men who had gathered

around the van, watching the activities with apparent fascination. “What’s it about?”

wondered another. “Who’s that actress?” “When is it out?” “Can I have a poster?”

“Bhaya, won’t you give me a poster” “Is it an English movie?” “Give me a poster,

bhai.” “Is she the producer of the film?” “Bhai, give me two posters!” Finally Ahsan

spun around and challenged the more persistent among them. “Will you put

something in your home, that’s meant for the street?!” he asked rhetorically [ghore

lagaben, rastay lagonar jinish?]. The embarrassing implication of Ahsan’s challenge

or the severity with which it was fielded, made the group retreat. Mithu pulled us out

of the crowd and we resumed our journey to find more walls in the direction of

Farmgate. “Why don’t you just give them the posters,” asked Paul. Ahsan looked at

him dismissively: “They’ll just throw them away, it’s our loss.”

I asked Liton about the work of the posterwallah. He told me the work is

better paid now then it was when he first started 8 years ago, but that the work is more

difficult today. “Why is that?” I asked him. “There are less walls in Dhaka,” he

replied. “Less walls?” I thought to myself, “How can that be?” Liton continued:

“Dhaka has changed so much, there are so many big buildings, where you cannot put


18

up any posters” [boro building yekhane kono poster lagate pare na]. More apartment

blocks and office towers meant less walls, more notices forbidding the pasting of bills.

“It is very difficult to find walls in Dhaka today. It is not like it was before.”

We reached Farmgate at 11:54pm. Mithu slowed the van into the throbbing

traffic. Night and day, Farmgate was alive. The market cum bus station cum

intersection cum commercial centre cum school district cum government area cum

park is a central point in Dhaka.“Gabtoli, Gabtoli, Gabtoli,” the ticket-collecters cried

out their destinations, hanging from the busses that pushed past each other, coming in

and out of the lay-by on the far side. A handcart loaded with long bamboo poles was

pushed precariously through the Farmgate traffic. The area was given its contours by

the numerous traffic islands aimed to separate out the traffic coming from three major

roads onto Farmgate. Each of these islands in the whirling stream of vehicles was

settled with salesmen selling shoes, lottery tickets, snacks, underwear and plastic

goods from sheets spread out on the ground. In the Green Road estuary, rickshaws,

CNGs and tempo’s waited for custom, keeping out of the way of the heavy buses that

ruled the streets. But even the buses waited as a large flock of buffalo’s ambled past,

their barefoot drivers guiding them to their final destination at the Kawran Bazar

market, further along the road. The many restaurants on Farmgate were supplied by

this large kitchen market, and like the market, stayed open around the clock. Hot

breads were lifted from the tandoors on the Farmgate pavements while steaming

plates of biriani were pulled up from deep inside the round cauldrons wrapped with

red cloths. The homeless, the heroinci’s and the street children rubbed shoulders with

the businessmen, the police-officers and professionals on their way home. High above

all this activity, a blue neon sign shone from the roof of the massive cinema hall that

for decades had defined the area: Anondo [Pleasure].


19

Mithu braked at the corner of the Anondo cinema hall, underneath one of the

‘overbridges’. Within seconds we had attracted a good crowd. Unperturbed, Liton

climbed up the protective pavement railings and leaned into the large cement pillar

that kept up the overbridge. Posters were attached to every bit of its surface.

Advertisements of all sorts had formed a thick layer of paper wrapping around the

pillar and to this Liton added another layer of sedimentation as he pasted Khoj-The

Search posters in a ribbon around its circumference. Mithu darted through oncoming

traffic and reached the road divider. He clambered through the barbed wire and put up

a set of posters on the middle pillar of the overbridge.

Liton’s acrobatics swelled the crowd around our van. We had now been joined

by a friend of ours, Tanvir, whose particular skills at late night urban travel we’d

enlisted for the remainder of our journey. His key talent was talking his way out of

rickshaw robberies and hold ups. Over 6 feet tall and handsome, the crowd

immediately decided Tanvir was the hero of Khoj-The Search. “Hero, hero,” the

whispers flew, as Tanvir lit another Benson. Combined with my whiteness and Paul’s

camera, the arrival of the police was inevitable. “Is he the hero?” the uniformed man

asked Paul. Ahsan looked on annoyed, the arrival of the police could only spell

trouble. The policeman commanded a poster. Without hesitation, Ahsan handed him

one. Folding out the flimsy paper, the officer held up the poster, looking serious as he

inspected its imagery. “You’re the director of the film,” he informed me, “but you

shouldn’t be out at this time of night.” Members of the assembled audience now

leaned in to follow the new twist to this action plot. Irritated, the policeman hollered

at them. A car, trying to turn the corner around our cycle honked at the crowd. Further

agitated, the policeman now shouted at Ahsan to move along. Dashing back through

the traffic, Mithu pushed the van into movement and told us to jump on. Gathering


20

speed, the van swirled past the shoe vendors, turning left towards Indira Road. In the

relatively peaceful one-way street flanked by tall leafy trees, we waited for Liton to

catch up.

The city in flux

Ahsan invoked the distinction between the street and the home in a rhetorical move to

embarrass the men who bothered him in his work. The separation between the inside

and outside has been used in a number of ways to explain urban practices in South

Asia.33 For Ahsan, the distinction was clear: you don’t put things in your home that

are meant for the street. The opposition between the home and the street was one of

three dichotomies that appeared in my converstions with the posterwallahs, alongside

the distinctions between day and night, and now and then. While the latter were

temporal and referred to the continuing changing nature of the city, the former was

spatial and suggested where domesticity and sociality could emerge within that rush

of change.

“Working at night is wonderful.” Rokon explained the pleasures of the

nighttime city. “The night is quiet [niribili], while daytime brings nuisance and

agitation [genjam, jontrona].” Using the word niribili, literally meaning solitary,

Rokon set off the agitating daytime crowd from the peaceful solitude of the city at

night. “At night, there are no cars, it is solitary, the [street] lights are on, it is very

nice.” Even Farmgate would quiet down a bit after midnight, as the city’s appearance

oscillated between its two faces: daytime and nighttime. Despite the dense traffic and

33 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Public Space in Calcutta’ in Public Culture Vol. 10, No. 1 (1997), pp. 83-113; Mahua Sarkar, Visible histories, disappearing women: producing Muslim womanhood in late colonial Bengal (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008)


21

its associated noise, and the intense use of the streets and pavements during the

daytime, at night the city would become surprisingly quiet. This clear opposition

between day and night structured Rokon’s work. “We just can’t put anything up

during the day, too much genjam.” The posterwallahs were forced to work at night,

requiring a measure of solitude.

“Before we could paste during the day but now we can’t.” I asked since when

they worked at night. Rokon counted: “about 10, 12 years we now work at night.”

Like Liton, Rokon juxtaposed the city of now (ekhon) with the city of before (age).

Before there were more walls, now they were more difficult to find. Before they could

work during the day, now they had to work at night. A notion of a previous and

disappeared city was invoked to describe and make sense of the contemporary city.

While the opposition between day and night framed the city in a cyclical time-frame,

before/now structured the city along a linear temporal axis. In places, this ‘before’ city

was still tangibly present. The names of roads and buildings indicated the changing

political, sociological or cultural shape of the city: Airport Road ran past the Airport

once upon a time, before the new airport was built further out of town and eventually

swallowed by the ever-expanding city. While there were some urban sites with a

certain historical resonance (such as the Mughal Lalbagh Fort, the colonial Curzon

Hall, the Parliament), the ‘before’ city was largely spectral, as it had been built over

and pulled down. This ‘before’ was a shapeless reference against which the

contemporary city could come into relief. Undefined, the ‘before’ city haunted the

‘now’ city in the various forms of nostalgia that coloured contemporary evaluations of

the city. Both the cyclical change in day and night and historical transformations

impacted how posterwallahs worked. The city’s sights, sounds, smells and tastes were

similarly transformed over time, both within the 24 hours of a day, and in the lifetime


22

of the city. The city continually renewed itself alongside the film posters that

announced the next new thing. The lifecycle of the poster, put up, covered over, torn

down and put up yet again, played out alongside the continuous transformation of the

city. The two processes were linked and both accentuated the city as a space of flux

and newness.

“I do this part time,” Rokon said, “We paste posters about 2 or 3 days a

week.” The film posters amounted to about eight nights of work per month for Rokon.

“I also have a tea stall near Jamuna Films.” Ranging from a small fire with a kettle

and a few chipped Shinepukur cups, to more elaborate bamboo or wooden structures,

the tea stall is the quintessential Dhaka street site. From quick refreshments to lengthy

addas, the tea stall provides a space of urban leisure and conviviality for the majority

of the city’s men. While women often run tea stalls, late into the night, only in upper

middle class areas such as Dhanmondi or around Dhaka University, did women

constitute any real part of the clientele for these tea stalls.

On the smaller streets of the Kakrail area, Rokon’s two jobs had certain points

of contact. The wall along which his tea stall was positioned would carry the posters

of recent films. “Rickshawwallahs come to have a cup of tea, do some research

watching the poster, asking who the actors are, discuss the film,” he explained, “Not

everyone follows it. But garments [workers] ask about the films when they walk

home.” The many young women who walk along the city’s streets to and from work

in garments’ factories (collectively addressed metonymically as the object they

manufactured) would pass innumerable tea stalls, each morning and evening. 34 Rokon

saw them come by daily and considered them the audience of the films. The posters

on the city walls constituted a talking point for those traversing the streets and in this

34 Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London and New York: Verso, 2000).


23

way the posters contributed to the tea stall as a space of urban sociality and

conviviality. The perpetual newness of the film poster provided a means to engage

one another within the flux of the churning city.

“And when you are putting up the posters, do people come up to you? I asked

Rokon. “Yes, they do,” said Rokon, “they ask if the film is good and about the story.”

Remembering Ahsan’s outburst, I asked whether Rokon would give any posters away.

“We have to give them posters, otherwise they just rip them off the walls.” Clearly,

these passers-by were not bothered by the nature of the poster as a ‘street thing.’ In

the context of the tea stall too, the posters became wallpaper and highlighted not so

much the distinction between ghor (home) and rasta (street), but produced

conviviality in the domain of the street. In the flows of movement of people passing

through the continually changing city, the newness of the film posters provided a site

of sociality. The tea stall wall provided a certain intimacy at the intersection of the

cyclical changes in the city and the ever-new posters announcing cinema’s latest

sights.

Indira Road to Bijoy Sarani !

As we left Farmgate behind us, the quiet of the midnight city slowly became palpable.

The shutters on the shops were down, tarpaulins covered the fruit stands. “Stop there

on the left,” said Liton to Mithu. Ahsan objected: “Not there, that’s a mosque. Stop

further ahead.” “That’s not a mosque,” said Liton. “Look there,” replied Ahsan,

pointing up. We all looked up. “It’s only a mosque on the first floor,” tried Liton,

ready to paste on the wall underneath the purported mosque. “Keep going,” Ahsan

instructed Mithu.


24

Mithu cycled along the dark shops to the next intersection. There he pulled the

van to the side. On the other side of the road, a clinic stood inside a narrow garden,

marked off by a boundary wall. The wall was covered in remnants of posters and

painted advertisements, recently scrubbed from its surface, leaving stray letters and

colours across the wall. Liton and Mithu set off across the street with a role of posters

and two buckets, while we waited with Ahsan.

We heard the shouting behind us. A young boy cried out. From near Farmgate,

a group of about ten boys came running our way. They looked in their early teens,

maybe ten to fourteen. One of the bigger boys caught up with a smaller boy running

ahead. He grabbed his arm and drew him down to the ground. The boy screamed,

falling down. The bigger one brought down a stick on the smaller boy’s back. He

cried out again. As the other boys stood around, shouting, the child was viciously

beaten. The bigger boy enacted his clear sovereignty over the group. For the first time

that evening, I was rattled. Crying, the smaller boy eventually got away, screaming

angrily as he ran towards the nearest side street. The chilling scene before us

resembled in everything the stock flash-back of the Bangladeshi action film, in which

the backstory of the hero shows a young boy arriving in the city to end up on Dhaka’s

streets, where he overcomes the odds to become a (largely extra-legal) force of justice

for the repressed. The popular action flicks thematised the city’s devouring

inequalities, its impunity and the violence that its poor young men regularly

confronted.

Turning at the next roundabout, Mithu cycled calmly onto the very empty

avenue that ran past the Parliament Building. It was now 12:30am. From here he

would follow this one road, cycling in a straight line all the way until he reached the

Mirpur 11 suburb at dawn. Magnificent krishnachura trees flanked one side of the


25

street. Behind the flowering trees, the angular shapes of Louis Kahn’s Parliament

complex were lit up in yellow sodium lights. Opposite, the entrance gates to the

residential Monipuripara area were closed. The street in between was calm and

peaceful. Once again we were stopped by the police on account of my presence.

“You’d better be careful around here,” said the policeman to me, “it is dangerous at

night.” His duty to warn fulfilled, he let us get on with our journey.

The tea stalls along the walls of Monipuripara had shut for the night. It was

nearing 1am. The portions of wall right beside the stalls were covered in all sorts of

posters. The Khoj-The Search poster was still there from another round made by

another team of posterwallahs. Mithu cycled on slowly. “How do you know where to

paste the posters?” I asked Liton who sat on the other side of the van. “We know

where people stop and watch,” said Liton, “We know exactly what happens when we

paste where.” “What does that mean,” I asked. “We know where the busses turn,

where people will have time to watch the posters,” he said, explaining the ebbs and

flows of the vast human circulation through the city. “Gulistan roundabout has this

very beautiful high up wall,” he continued, “You can put posters up there right from

the top to the bottom.” As the bus-station for long-distance buses to the South,

Gulistan was the arrival and departure point for many migrants and travellers between

Dhaka and the countryside. I asked where else was good in the city for posters. “We

start with the production offices,” said Liton, “so that the booking agents can see the

posters.” Booking agents were the link between film production houses and the

theatres, booking new films for cinema hall proprietors. “Second, we go around to the

newspaper offices, so that the journalists will give the film some publicity.” After

these key sites, the posters were distributed by nighttime routes like the one we were


26

on. At each point different routes of circulation intersected, making the poster meet

the eyes that moved through the city space.

“What about that wall?” I pointed to a long white wall, 2 meters high and clear

of any advertisements or posters. “That isn’t a wall,” said Liton. “What? Why?” I

asked, “it’s a perfect wall!” “It isn’t a wall, it is the cantonment,” explained Liton.

Behind the wall was the runway of the old Dhaka airport, now in use by the

Bangladesh Air Force (‘A Great Way of Life’ announced the English title over the

entrance to the base). The pristine white wall could not be used as advertisement

space. This wall was not a wall.

Urban Viewing: Density and Intensity

The rounds of the posterwallahs through the city opened up some of its walls,

animating the city’s surfaces. Their activities echoed in the life-cycle of the poster,

never inert, always changing, as the fragile paper disintegrated and a continually

changing collage of imagery spoke from the walls. “We do four nights for one film,”

said Rokon, “We then do the same route twice. Most of these posters stay only for one

day. If they last longer, they may stay for maximum seven days.” I had been checking

the route I took with Liton and it was true, the poster we had put up on the walls of

Monipuripara had only lasted one day, before being ripped, torn or covered over. On

the Farmgate overbridge, however, the posters had held out for a few more days. Only

once I started to pay attention to the posters, I realised how quickly the surfaces of the

walls changed.

I wondered whether such high turnover could really be sufficient for the needs

of the film producer. “One day of publicity is enough,” said Rokon, “the poster is the

number one strength [shokti] for advertising films.” Second to this came the rickshaws


27

and van-gari’s that would be loaded with posters and speakers, travelling around to

advertise a film. While in the suburbs, small towns and villages, this was a very

effective manner of attracting audiences, in the mega-city of Dhaka, the producers

relied entirely on the poster to do the work. “Bhodrolok don’t watch films so putting

advertisements in the paper is not of any use,” Rokon diagnosed the need for the street

poster, “Garments go and see films. I like to watch films.” This sociological account

of film’s key audiences generated its advertising strategies. “When a film is released

on Friday, you won’t know it without a poster. People look at posters and listen.”

Seeing the poster on the street and hearing others chat about films was the best way to

generate publicity and spectators.

With films reliant on the street poster to gather its audience, the posterwallah’s

activities were organised through a set of theories about urban viewing. These

combined an understanding of the morphology of the city and the nature of film

imagery as related to circulation, density and intensity. “I’ve been doing this for 16

years,” Rokon invoked the before city to express its present condition, “Before it was

16, 18, 20 pieces [sheets making up one poster]. Now it is only 4 sheets.” The four-

sheeters were the largest posters going in Dhaka. “The big ones, we put at Shyamoli,

Gulistan, Sydabad, Sadorghat, Azimpur, Bongopara. There are big walls there.”

Rokon described the nine main routes through the city that posterwallahs used.

Combined they covered all of Dhaka. “The best places for posters are, first, Gulistan,

then Kakrail, Polton, Gulistan overfly, Sodorghat and Gabtoli.” These routes

intersected directly with patterns of circulation of people through the intensely dense

areas of Dhaka. Posters here, repeatedly pasted, would yield the highest visibility for

the posters. They could be considered ‘dense viewing sites.’


28

Lakshmi Srinivas, in her general account of cinema halls in Bangalore, has

pointed out that there is a “correspondence between ‘catchment areas’ and certain

parts of the city [which] finds visual expression in the posters and billboards that

publicize the films.”35 This is not the case in Dhaka, where producers rather than

exhibitors do the bulk of advertising, in a city that is both incredibly densely

populated and largely monolingual. Film producers don’t know exactly where their

audiences will be but know that they will be moving around, often slowly. They rely

on circulation as a vector of film visibility and publicity. While cinema hall owners

may advertise a film in their neigbourhood, Dhaka’s posterwallahs know visibility

depends on circulation, on the inevitably dense paths of movement of approximately

15 million Dhakaites36 making their way through the city.

Like Liton, Rokon named Gulistan as the best place for posters. “Getting

down at Gulistan [bus station], it will immediately catch people’s eye.” He said loker

chokhe pore, which means ‘falling on people’s eyes,’ highlighting its affective and

inevitable force. Rokon combined the inevitability of being caught by the poster, with

its impact on the eyes. “When you get down at Gabtoli [bus station] you see posters

on the wall that you can’t get in the village. Dazzling, an amazing thing!” [Jholok,

obhak jinish!]. The poster was radiant in Rokon’s recounting, flashing out from the

enormous walls of the large bus stations in the city. Here, not only daily commuters

from outlying Gazipur or Narayanganj came off the busses, but a constant flow of

travellers and migrants between the villages and the city would enter Dhaka through

these gateways. “In villages the posters are only in the bazaar, not along the roads as

35 Lakshmi Srinivas, ‘Cinema halls, locality and urban life’ in Ethnography Vol. 11, No. 1 (2010), p. 196. 36 United Nations Statistics Division, World Statistics Pocketbook, 2015 edition, Series V, No. 39 (2015).


29

in Dhaka.” Posters participated in maintaining these distinct rural and urban

economies of viewing.

In Rokon’s account, the urban space was animated by the ‘dazzling flash’ of

the film poster imagery that would fall upon the eyes and burn itself into the senses of

those arriving in and travelling through the city. It was the bright intensity of the

poster, its jholok nature, that made it efficacious in being seen. The luminous imagery,

capable of assaulting the eye, draws citizens into the crowd as passers-by are

viscerally engaged through cinema’s attacked on the body.37 Radiant, the poster

unsettles the solemnity of the wall and opens up its potential to guide the viewing

passer-by into the visual forms of the cinema. The speed of its turnover maintains its

newness, and the material effects of its placing within the medium of the wall, and its

resulting ruination, disperses this intense imagery into a decontextualized, self-

referencing presence that goes much beyond the particularities of the film it

advertised. Along this continuously transformed palimpsest of images a vast urban

public moves, apprehending this continually newness that remains a key experience of

the city. At dense viewing sites, radiant imagery made the cinema a visceral presence

in the city and for its population.

But there was a limit to the power of visual intensity and circulatory density.

The bright excitement of the posters, blazing across the eyes of the many who would

pass them by, could not do its work in all urban locations. I told Rokon about the

discussion between Liton and Ahsan at the mosque. “We don’t put posters up in front

of a mosque,” confirmed Rokon, “because if people see a poster their prayers will be

spoiled [namaj noshto hobe]. It isn’t allowed, and we also don’t do it.” Again, the

intensity of the poster’s imagery was thought to reach out and have an effect even on

37 Mazzarella, Censorium; Chowdhury, ‘Picture-Thinking’.


30

accidental viewers. This made the poster inappropriate to certain places. Rokon

recited: “Not on the Secretariat, Shongshod Bhobon [Parliament], Bongo Bhobon

[presidential residence], PM office, the cantonment, not in front of graveyards,

churches and temples.” The spaces of sacred and secular authority were off limits for

the posterwallahs. These were ‘thin’ viewing places, inimical to non-authorised

imagery. They proclaimed visually their incontestable authority. The cantonment

would therefore not serve as a surface for the dazzling appeal of the film poster. It was

inimical to its intense visuality and the presence of cinema, and the fantasies of sex,

violence and justice that it contained. Without the capacity to mediate this visual

world, this wall was not truly a wall in the eyes of the posterwallah.

Agargao Onwards !

We crossed Bijoy Sarani. The pavement here was separated from a park behind it by a

low wire fence. Inside the park was the tomb of General Ziaur Rahman. On the

pavement this side of the wire men in lungi’s sauntered along. Some went up to the

fence, and negotiated with the sex workers waiting for custom on the other side. It

was the last stretch of living city before the emptiness of the Agargao area.

“You’d better go home,” said Ahsan as we started to cross over into Agargao,

“this is where all the CNG crime happens.” The newspapers regularly carried

gruesome stories about nighttime attacks from drive-by CNGs. “Aren’t you worried

about it?” I asked Ahsan. “We left everything at the office,” he replied. They carried

no wallets, watches, mobiles or other valuables; only the clothes on their back and a

few taka for tea and breakfast at the end of the night. “This way we can’t be robbed.”

I asked whether anything had ever happened. “I was robbed on one round once,” said

Ahsan, “that’s when I learnt. I had a mobile with me that my uncle in Saudi Arabia


31

had given me. It was stolen. Gifts are hard to loose.” “Maya,” nodded Tanvir, “you

were attached to it.”

“Eh kali [empty],” Paul waved at a stationary CNG, waiting for late-night

customers. We climbed in and said goodbye to Mithu, Liton and Ahsan, who set off

towards Mirpur 11. Our CNG sped in the opposite direction, at a velocity rarely

reached on the busy daytime avenues. We flew back along the road. The CNG

stopped in front of the barricades closing off a new link road due to be opened by the

Prime Minister. Underneath a stairwell leading up into a market, a long table had been

set up next to a tea stall. “Best roti anywhere in the city at this time of night,” said

Paul, as we sat down on the wooden bench. The make-shift shop only opened after

midnight and catered to night guards, rickshawwallahs on the nightshift, street kids

hoping for a meal, farmers coming into Kawran Bazar from outside the city, and other

night dwellers. On the other side of the road men gathered in queues on the pavement.

The city corporation was fixing up the road and those lined up hoped for a night’s

manual labour. While they waited, we ate and entertained the assembled company

with our posterwallah adventures. It was almost 2am.

Film Posters on City Walls

How does the cinema inhabit the city and shape its experience? In this article, I have

taken the perspective of the young men who work at night to put film posters on the

walls of Dhaka city to engage this question. Their work is positioned at the

intersection of the surface of the wall, the film poster and the crowds that circulate

along them. The posterwallahs’ activities allow a rethinking of how these three come

together.


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For Dhaka’s afficheurs, the wall is a medium, a means by which the cinema

can be made present in the city. They follow the lines of the walls through the city,

strategically papering its surfaces. Their ideas of the morphology and mobility of the

city, shape how and where they work. Their theories of the city take into account its

flows and circulations, filtered through distinctions between now and then, night and

day, village and city, inside and outside. They combine these ideas of the city’s flows

with their understanding of the cinema’s imagery as jholok, radiant and intense, to

determine which walls can be best mobilized as a medium for the film poster.

As material structures, the walls shape the messages that emerge on their

surfaces. Exposed to weather and urban life, the accruements on the surfaces of walls

form palimpsests and the image becomes unmoored from its framing within the

poster. The wall reconstitutes a frame, in which the cinema image is suspended among

other imagery to gesture beyond the particular messages that the posters, slogans and

advertisements were designed to impart. It becomes part of a wider visual atmosphere.

It makes for a presence of cinema in general, as the details of a film’s specificity fade

with the crumbling of the poster. Due to the decreased specificity and the radiant

nature of the cinema’s imagery, it can be caught by a glance of a passer-by. Seeing the

work of the poster in this way expands its scope, delinking the poster imagery from

the individual film text towards cinema more broadly understood as an “aesthetic

formation.”38 The cinema here is an aesthetic environment that is dispersed through

the city. As a part of the city’s skin, the continuously ‘new’ surface of the wall

emerges as a part of the “kinetic media sensorium” 39 of the contemporary city.

38 Birgit Meyer, Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 39 Ravi Sundaram, ‘The visceral city and the theatre of fear’ in Architectural Design Vol. 77, No. 6 (2007), pp. 30–33.


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My articulation of the relations between the film poster, the urban wall and the

cinematic public suggests three things. First, to be part of the life world of the cinema

you don’t need to watch films. The differentiation between the audience for films and

the cinematic public provides a means to address the presence and relevance of the

cinema also for those genres or industries that are not universally embraced, in places

where the cinema inhabits an ambivalent place. This is significant when accounting

for the ubiquity and importance of cinema across South Asia. Second, the newness of

the cinema and the continuous renewal of the surfaces of the city’s walls is significant

for how both the cinema (always the next new thing) and the city are experienced

(never still, always changing). Through the continually re-affixed posters of ever

newer films onto the cities walls, the sense of the newness of each comes to be

experienced simultaneously and analogously. The turn-over is barley noticeable,

submerged in the constant flux of the city. Third, the very visual language of the

popular cinema’s aesthetic produces a bright intensity that makes use of ‘dense

viewing sites’ to be efficacious to the extent that it ‘burns’ the imagery of the popular

cinema and its basic tropes (violence, impunity, inequality, desire) onto the retina and

conscience of the passer-by, interiorising its imagery as an experience of the city. This

makes the cinema constitutive in the sensory experience of the city. The limits to this

are felt at ‘thin viewing sites’, where the wall is not a wall, indexing the inequalities

and structures of power that determine the spaces of the cities in and on which the

cinema flourishes.

Acknowledgements

For taking me along through the cinema’s urban nights and illuminating it, I thank

Rokon, Mithu, Liton as well as Tanvir and Paul. The ideas and arguments in this


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paper were developed in a long-standing conversation with Ajay Gandhi and

following generous comments by Lawrence Cohen. I am grateful to them both.

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